Natsumi Hayashi makes some beautiful images

I got this article on her from a friend on Facebook yesterday (yes, I still use it) and I am seriously in love with her work. I love everything about it: the idea, the execution, the compositions and the surreal feeling given by the images.

In the article, she says of her work: “I got an idea from an English idiom that says ‘to have one’s feet firmly planted on the ground’ applies to a practical type of person. In Japan, we have the exact same idiom. But I am not a practical person at all. Therefore, I try not to have my feet on the ground in my self-portrait photos to show my true self.”

This says so much about her, and about Japan as a whole. I love that she had this idea and it’s really inspiring to me personally to get out there and just keep playing, keep experimenting with the wheel in order to get something new.

I mean, I jump for Claes all the time. This time, this weekend, after seeing this article, Kristi and I are going to give levitating a go and see how that works out for us. That’ll be our homage to Natsumi and it’ll be a fun experiment, to see how long it takes us to get the shots that she’s trying to get.

In the article, Natsumi says of her process: “Sometimes I need to jump more than 300 times to get the perfect shot. I set the camera with the shutter speed of 1/500 second or faster to freeze my jumping movement.” She also says that sometimes she works alone, and sometimes she has a friend there to help. I’ll be taking that into consideration when we try our photos out. We’re very lucky, because Kristi’s camera has an awesome sports setting. I think we might need less tries to get the images right.

I really can’t even describe how much I love the images she’s made. They are so dreamy, so otherworldly.

This amount of jumping gets really demanding, I bet her legs are super strong by now.